Kristal Lorraine Forest, formerly of Ithaca , was living with her two Calcutta street-dogs in Campo Verde, Arizona, when she decided that if she moved to Mexico, she could get by on her Social Security payments alone. Kristal had picked up and moved plenty of times all alone before, but this time she hired a local homeless man to help her through the move. After everything had been packed away, the landlord inspected the apartment, and handed Kristal a wad of bills for the deposit refund, Then she drove off with her helper and the two dogs.....in the Red Nissan SUV pulling a UHaul trailer. When Kristal's family in California hadn't heard from her for three months and there had been no activity on her bank account, they reported her as a missing person. Look here: http://dogs-plot.blogspot.com/

On the Dog's Plot four or five acres, and in the brush land and pasture land surrounding us we have the Rose that grew at the doorstep of the original homestead house and, then some seedlings I brought here from Ithaca along with Rose of Sharron, which is not a Rose at all, and then out back in the orchard and conspiciusly out on the cattle range, there are occasional multi flora, roses with there simple, small, and multitudinous flowers...a generally unpopular escape from Gardens, and then the Roses that we used to call Swamp Roses because they grow in my native swamps up north, along the lake shore, and beside streams. We call this place Dog's Plot, and because these pink, sometimes white, simple Roses are abundent here, arching, abounding, I began referring to them as Dog Roses, and was then very surprised when my friend Der Rosenmeister, that Dog Rose was really the official English name for those Roses. Several sub species exist, and so do Swamp Roses, which are something else. And of course Dog Roses turn out to be more than special; magical and possiblly world saving, according to Wiki and Nature Enquirer, as soon as they get the news. But just look at these Dog Roses. That is all you know, and all you need to know. Truth is beauty and beauty is truth, and sleeping Dogs never lie. The last picture in this series shows a Pear Tree trying to come up in the pasture. The cattle prune them down to the thorny parts, so they stay dwarfed, as they do in the hay fields, waiting to spring up like the Cayuga's from whom they descend, by way of French Jesuit Missionary gardeners, then surviving the great Sullivan massacre, by sprouting from their roots. Everybody should do that.

I love my scythes and I abuse them terribly with my over-enthusiasm, which every once in a while comes up against hard objects. Each of these two twenty four inch ditch scythes have been broken three times and welded twice. The welds themselves held, but I will be retiring these two now, ordering a new ditch scythe or two, and hacking with my brush scythe for the time being.